A Few Thoughts About Money

In the last 4 months, my network has heavily changed. I started meeting a very diverse set of people. My learning curve has suddenly accelerated. The last time I learned so much at such a short period of time was when I moved from school to corporate life.

My understanding of things has been disrupted (for the better). One of those things is money. Sharing three things I learned from people who have made tremendous wealth.

#1: Money is just like knowledge, connections, positions, and relationships.

Meaning, money is simply a tool for living well. It does not make sense to amass it for the sole purpose of amassing it. People make the mistake of measuring their worth based on their net worth. But money is just a vanity metric – it looks good on paper but useless unless you know how and what to use it for.

Having a lot of money is useless if you don’t how to use it – in the same way that amassed knowledge or connections is useless if you don’t know how to use it. Therefore, amassing money is not important. What is important is to know how to acquire it when you need to and how to use it when you want to.

#2: You will only be given the amount of money which you are ready to manage. And if ever you come into money which you are not yet ready to manage, you will eventually lose it (i.e. Lotto winners, inheritance).

#3: The best way to acquire money is to give value. Never acquire money in exchange for your time. Your time is limited – so the money you can get will be limited. On the other hand, the value you can create is unlimited – so the money you can receive is also unlimited. It’s not easy to understand this – but this is real gold.

In the corporate world, I heard a lot of people complain about not getting a salary increase. When I probe why they think they deserve an increase, their reasoning is that it’s been a long time since they’ve had an increase – no mention of value they’ve been able to add. That is the mindset of somebody who is exchanging time for money. “I give you time, so you give me money.” Quid pro quo. Do not fall into this trap. Create value instead, the money follows.